Unexpected results... are good results!!!

During the last week we successfully drilled the first site on the Gulf of Cadiz, just around 30 km southeast of Faro. The target was a gigantic mound of mud, silt and sand (the Faro drift) that has been shaped by bottom currents linked to the Mediterranean Outflow…for about the last 5 million years of Earth history.

We recovered nearly 1000 m of sediment from three separate holes, the deepest to 526 m below the seafloor. As expected the lithologies consisted mostly on cyclic patterns of mud, silt and sand, together with other detailed features of the sediments and their microfossil content, know as contourites.

Quite unexpected, however, was our encounter with thick turbidite sands (left on the photo below) and chaotic debris-flow deposits (right on the photo below) directly beneath the contourite drift. These were derived more directly from the continental shelf and coastal regions, transported downslope by turbidity currents and other high-energy mass transport processes. They are full of quartz sand, broken-up shallow water shelly debris, and even some pebbles.